Saturday, August 11, 2012

Make Classic Crock Pickles

Cucumbers are sneaky, secretive. We had a plant, just one,
growing beside our back steps this summer and at first it was a lazy little
vine that made blossoms but no fruit. The flowers shriveled and dropped. Turned
out the blossoms needing pollinating. There weren’t enough bees around to do
the job. Anita showed me how to take a tiny paint brush, dip it into a male
blossom and then pass the goodness into a female. She told me how to tell the
difference between them, but I didn’t get it, so I stabbed every one I found
for the week she was gone. Apparently they figured out their chemistry because
this little vine has grown big. Big enough to cover the oregano, wrap around
the sedum and climb the bee balm. Meanwhile it is producing handfuls of sweet,
crisp cucumbers.

A few manage to hide behind a leaf for an extra day or two
until you find them grown to the size of a man’s tube sock. I swear they can do
this overnight. Grow that big. Whatto
do with them?

Make crock pickles.

I often crave pickles, and as I handled these big ones, I
though of the old wooden pickle barrels that used to sit beside the cash
register of every general store in America. What I didn’t realize is that they
required no refrigeration because the natural fermentation process preserved
them.

You can make your own crock pickles quite easily and the
recipe can be tweaked a little to get it how you them.

This is a method of preserving food that is being recovered.
Cucumbers are especially well adapted to this kind of fermentation, though
other vegetables like onions, carrots pepper are good, too. If you’ve had to do
a course of antibiotics lately, more doctors are now suggesting you replace all
that good bacteria in your gut with probiotics. Millions, billions of those
teeny, tiny seething little organisms that help us digest food and fight off
evil are now dead along with all the bad ones. Our American diets do not
include enough of the beneficial bacteria found in yogurt and pickles and
fermented foods. This could be a start.

So, if you have a few extra cucumbers, now is the time. You
can make a small batch, enough for two quarts. Whet your appetite, pass one of
these to a friend, a kid, a spouse and you may be rewarded with more than just
a little help for the bacteria farm growing in your gut.

Classic Crock Pickles

(makes 2 Quarts)

2 lbs. pickling cucumbers or spears

1 quart water

3 TBSP pickling salt

2 cloves garlic, peeled

2 fronds of fresh seeded dill (or 1 TBSP seed)

1 T mustard seed (optional)

1 tsp celery seed (optional)

1 head of garlic

Oak or grape leaves (preserves crispness)

Soak the cucumbers overnight in cold water.

Sterilize 2 glass quart jars. Add 2 oak or grape leaves, a
frond of dill seed, and several cloves of garlic to each jar.

Combine the water, salt, garlic, mustard and celery seeds in
a bowl and stir to dissolve the salt. This is your pickling brine.

Pack each jar with spears or whole pickling cucumbers,
leaving at least 2 inches of room at the top of each jar.

Pour brine into each jar, filling to the top. All the
cucumbers need to be covered in at least 1” of brine.If you need more liquid, mix 1 TBSP pickling
salt in 1 cup water and add it to the brine to reach the desired volume.

The cucumbers, whether whole or cut in spears, will float
and you need to invent a way to keep them submerged. We found a small round
river rock, sent it through the dishwasher to sterilize it and placed that in
the top of our jars. If you have a small enough plate or seal a bag of dry
beans, anything that will rest on top of the jar to keep them down.

Leave jars at room temp out of direct sunlight. It’s a good
idea to set the jar in a bowl because as the brine works it will bubble and overflow a little. Check the jars every day. As the
fermentation process gets going, bubbles will rise in the brine and you will
see seeds being ferried up and down the pickling liquid.This is a good sign!It means the cucumbers are getting pickled.

A scum will form on the top of the brine every day (also a
good sign!). Skim it off and discard it and clean the rim of the jar so mold
does not form.

When the bubbles stop rising (after a week or so), take out
a pickle and sample it.If it is pickled
to its center, it is done. If it isn’t sour enough or pickled throughout, leave
the jar to sit out another day or two to complete the fermentation.The taste should be sour and salty and if you
speared the cucumbers, the skin should still be crunchy.

Refrigerate the jars when the pickles taste like you want
them to.Refrigeration slows the
fermentation process, but the scum will still form on top of the liquid. Remove
it regularly. They’ll keep for 4-6 months in the refrigerator.

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For many years we lived in Toad Hall, an old American Gothic Foursquare house named for the mansion in Wind in the Willows although ours wasn’t really a mansion, the kids just thought it was. Now we live in a different home – one more suited to aging with dignity – yes, well, we can hope – The House Between. “Between” because we are living that stage of life between now and what is to come. Sound a little macabre? It’s not. We needed move to a space with main floor accessibility for older people who may not always be able to climb stairs to sleep and eliminate. We love this home in a quiet neighborhood with offices overooking the wooded ravine behind where we feed birds and watch coyotes play leap frog. We love knowing, too, that this is not our final place – there is more healing and goodness in the next life. I’ve kept the name of my blog toadsdrinkcoffee because I don’t know how to migrate to a new one. The name is now even more obscure, but it had to do with living in Toad Hall and my addiction to coffee. However, I did migrate my old publication – Notes From Toad Hall– to the new one Letters from the House Between.